■ INDONESIA
Prison chief jailed for drugs
A Bali court sentenced a former prison security chief on Tuesday to four years in jail for drugs and weapons offenses. Muhammad Sudrajat was found guilty of possessing 0.2g of crystal methamphetamine and 50 rounds of ammunition. Sudrajat's arrest last September prompted police to investigate reports of a drug network in Bali's Kerobokan prison, where at least 10 Australians are serving heavy sentences for drug offenses. Sudrajat said after the conviction that he was sorry for tarnishing the image of the prison.
■ SAUDI ARABIA
Cleric defends dance
A prominent cleric has issued a rare public attack on religious hardliners angry over a video showing him dancing at a wedding, a newspaper reported on Tuesday. The video, posted online, showed Sheikh Abdul-Mohsen al-Obaikan dancing the Bedouin sword dance. Similar dances are also performed by royals at some national festivities. Wahhabist Sunni Islam frowns on singing and dancing. Obaikan, an adviser to the Ministry of Justice, defended himself in remarks published in Asharq al-Awsat, saying that society needed to "get over restrictions imposed by ignorant people." "They want to turn our weddings into funerals and joy to sadness," he said.
■ ESTONIA
Visa deal inked with US
The government signed a bilateral visa and air security deal with the US yesterday to pave the way to visa-free travel, ignoring protests from the European Commission. Latvia was scheduled to sign a similar deal yesterday, adding to a row between the EU executive and some new EU states keen to get US visa-free travel, but impatient to wait for the commission to do their negotiating for them. "Our common goal is to achieve visa-free travel for all EU member states," Interior Minister Juri Pihl said. "The realistic means for achieving this goal is bilateral negotiations."
■ INDIA
Police investigate police
The leader of the state of Goa promised on Tuesday to investigate allegations of local police incompetence made by the mother of a British teen found dead last month. Goa police at first said that 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling, whose bruised, partially undressed corpse was found on a beach just hours after she was seen at a nearby bar, had drowned. Chief Minister Digambar Kamat said police would find out if "there was a delay, mistake or laxity on the part of the officers." Police opened a murder investigation into Keeling's death on Sunday -- three weeks after she died.
■ THAILAND
Teens stealing scrap metal
Police vowed on Tuesday to crackdown harder on teens who prey on power pylons following the collapse of an electricity tower after the nuts and bolts holding it up were stolen and sold. The rampant theft of nuts and bolts from power pylons by teens who sell them as scrap metal caught the attention of media when a high-voltage electricity tower collapsed on Friday in Bangkok. No one was injured. Five teens were arrested for allegedly stealing the nuts and bolts. Police said the 17-year-olds admitted to selling them for US$44, which they spent in bars. The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand said fixing the tower would cost up to 10 million baht (US$317,000).
■ UNITED STATES
Muslim elected to Congress
Indiana voters on Tuesday elected a Muslim to the US Congress, the second of that faith chosen in US history. Andre Carson, grandson of the late Democrat representative Julia Carson, was elected to serve the balance of her term in the US House of Representatives in a special election. She died in last December, after serving 11 years. The younger Carson, 33, a member of the Indianapolis City Council who converted to Islam about a decade ago, will serve out the remainder of his grandmother's term. The first Muslim member of the US Congress is Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota.
■ MEXICO
Interior minister faces probe
The federal attorney general's office on Tuesday announced an investigation into allegations of corruption against Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino stemming from his years as a federal congressman and top energy official. The announcement came after a prominent opposition politician produced a series of contracts dated from 2000 to 2004 between state oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos and the Mourino family business, Transportes Especializados Ivancar SA.
■ FRANCE
Concorde charges sought
A public prosecutor has asked judges to bring manslaughter charges against US carrier Continental Airlines over the July 2000 crash of a Concorde that killed 113 people, the prosecutor's office said on Tuesday. An investigation concluded that a piece of metal left on the runway from a Continental flight caused one of the Air France Concorde's tires to burst on takeoff and send debris into an engine causing the crash. The prosecutor also sought charges against a French engineer, the former head of France's civil aviation authority and two Continental Airlines employees.
■ UNITED STATES
House fails to overturn veto
Democrats in the House of Representatives have failed to overturn US President George W. Bush's veto of a bill that would have prohibited the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on terrorist suspects. The vetoed legislation would have limited the CIA to using only the 19 interrogation methods approved in the Army Field Manual, which bans the use of waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning. CIA Director Michael Hayden has confirmed that the spy agency used the technique on three terrorist suspects in 2002 and 2003. The 225 to 188 House roll call on Tuesday was 51 votes short of the two-thirds majority required to overturn a veto.
■ FINLAND
Book returned 100 years on
A library-goer apparently thought "better late than never" and quietly returned a book on loan for more than 100 years to a library in the southern town of Vantaa. The library had long since lost track of the loan but welcomed back to its collections the bound copy of a 1902 volume of Vartija, an active religious monthly periodical at the time. "We are unclear when exactly it was borrowed and who returned it. There weren't any documents with it," said Minna Saastamoinen. "There is an old note attached to the book which says there is a fine of 10 pennies a week for late returns." The library sticker inside the cover, and the old-fashioned handwriting on it, showed the book was loaned out at the beginning of the last century, she said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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